Tired of studs carving roads? Get ready to sign the petition

View full sizeThe OregonianSixty seconds past midnight Saturday, the garage door closed on a longer-than-usual studded-tire season in Oregon.

Still skittering along with metal-toothed tires this morning? You’re asking for a $190 ticket — and adding fuel to Portland citizen activist Jeff Bernards’ spring crusade.

This summer, Bernards starts gathering signatures to put a statewide studded-tired ban before voters in 2012.

“Apparently,” Bernards said, “this is the only way to get these beasts off the road.”

Maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic.

But each of the winter tires has 60 to 120 metal studs inserted into it. The tires are built in such a way that even as the tread wears down, the studs maintain a constant length.

As a result, they need something to bite into. And if the road is clear of snow and ice, they’re biting into your tax dollars. Annually, studded tires cause more than $40 million in damage to roads statewide, according to the Oregon Department of Transportation.

In the Portland area, you don’t have to drive any further than U.S. 26 near the Oregon Zoo and Interstate 84 west of Troutdale to see the water-filled ruts and migrainous cracks.

Still, proposals to ban the tires have gone flat in the Legislature since 1974.

Frustrated, Bernards said he approached ODOT director Matt Garrett last year at a Columbia River Crossing hearing and asked when the state would join 10 other states outlawing them.

“But old ways die hard,” Armstrong said. “There are people who won’t buy a studless tire, no matter how hard I tried to sell it to them.”

As a child of the Montana and the Eastern Washington mountains, I get that. Dad swore by studs. I’ve used them, despite the extra cost of rotating tires each spring.

But with the evolution of tire technology, the state’s money woes and ODOT’s backlog of road projects, maybe it’s time for studs to fade into history with Chrysler’s dashboard record players (Google: “1958 Desoto”) and the Chevy Vega.

Bernards must gather 82,000 validated signatures to get a ban before voters.